Jovera Shakeel is in her fourth year at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), pursuing a joint major in Economics and Mathematics. Her area of interest lies in exploring the framework of poverty traps to design programs for the educational and economic integration of low-income communities at the intersection of gender, class, and disability. At Oxford, she is excited to explore the domain of economics, or development economics. In her 5-year teaching career at a welfare school, Jovera realised the role of the teaching system in setting up the trajectories of underserved communities; an occurrence that has inspired the academic undertaking she wants to pursue at Oxford. At LUMS, Jovera has been working as a Co-Researcher to investigate the role of Pakistan's informal economy in agricultural indicators, as part of a grant given by the university. She also serves as the President of the LUMS Consultancy Group, Pakistan's largest student-run consulting club. In 2020, she received a grant from the UNDP to set up a non-profit e-commerce platform called Mukhtalif, where artisans from excluded communities could create awareness about their stories and sell their work.
